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Errors in geography: This film shows Boulder City Nevada as a flatland farm community downriver from Hoover Dam being flooded by water after the dam is bombed. Boulder City is on a hilltop seven miles from the dam and some 1300 additional feet in elevation.See more »

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President:For every atom bomb dropped on our country, we have taken three to the enemy's heartland and we have huge stocks of atomic weapons in reserve.See more »

It was the early 1950s. J. Parnell Thomas of The House Unamerican
Activities Committee was accusing everyone in sight who had any measure
of public visibility with Communist allegiance. He went after Hollywood
in a series of highly publicized hearings, resulting in the arrests and
convictions of the Hollywood Ten for invoking their Fifth Amendment
rights against self incrimination... just before Thomas himself was
hauled before a Grand Jury to answer fraud charges. In a moment of high
irony Thomas himself invoked the Fifth Amendment before he was
convicted and imprisoned.

It was the time of "Tail Gunner Joe" McCarthy, who charged that
Communist influence in the State Department and Army had caused us to
"give away" China. He recklessly charged that Communists had
infiltrated nearly every aspect of American life... strictly in the
name of enhancing his own political power base. In the Army hearings
McCarthy was finally unmasked as an unprincipled charlatan by Army
counsel Joseph Welch, and he was subsequently censured by the Senate
for unethical conduct. Joe McCarthy subsequently died of alcoholism.

Besides these men... Richard Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover, Roy Cohn, and many
others in positions of power shrieked the gospel of anticommunism,
demanding that Americans surrender Constitutional rights in the name of
defeating this new enemy.

It was a time of fear where American opinion could be easily
manipulated. Partly for financial gain, and partly to spare itself from
further attacks by the Thomases and McCarthys, Hollywood became a
willing tool for the use of politicians, a propaganda machine that
produced a number of sensational films that capitalized on the anti Red
hysteria.

Some of the more notable Hollywood efforts were the major studio film
BIG JIM MACLAIN, starring John Wayne and James Arness, and a B-movie
effort, THE RED MENACE, whose opening credits graphic showed an octopus
wearing a hammer and sickle logo using it's tentacles to embrace the
entire world.

Pretty heavy handed stuff, but it was effective for the political
manipulation of a frightened American populace. It kept McCarthy off of
the studio's backs... as well as made a few B-movie bucks.

Along with these heavy, ideological films came INVASION USA, a mythical
war and adventure movie. Of the whole lot, THIS is the most interesting
of the Red Scare films, and it's the ONLY one that's ANY fun at all! Ed
Wood must have LOVED this film; it clearly taught him the cinematic
techniques he was to later make famous. As a cost cutting measure the
film makes GENEROUS use of stock footage, mostly Public Domain stuff
from military sources.

To make American planes into enemy ones, they just printed the stock
footage BACKWARDS, so that UNITED STATES AIR FORCE on the planes came
out REVERSED, and it looked sort of like Russian Cyrillic lettering.

In newly shot scenes where stock footage couldn't be used, set
decoration relied heavily on the local Army-Navy store! There are
literally TONS of military surplus equipment on the sets.

The fact that enemy troops were dressed in American military surplus
uniforms was explained neatly by saying that they were infiltrating in
disguise! As another cost cutting measure, the cast is ENTIRELY made up
of B list "talent" who would work for Actor's Equity scale. The amount
of over the top, hammy acting has to be seen to be believed! To throw
in a touch of sex, a drunken enemy soldier tries to ravage a blonde
American beauty, who chooses instead to kill herself by diving out of a
window!

The script is absurd, but for frightened audiences of the time it was
plausible... it bore out all of the dire threats that politicians had
been making. Hedda Hopper's review of the film said "It will scare the
pants off you!", and so it did. Bombing raids on San Francisco, the
Hoover Dam destroyed by a missile attack, and New York City hit with an
atomic bomb were enough to scare the pants off of ANYBODY.

For sheer kitsch value I give it a ten.

As a warning of what propaganda feeding the political hysteria stirred
up by unethical politicians can accomplish, it ALSO gets a ten.

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